The Last Bolshevik
Le tombeau d'Alexandre
Synopsis
Based on the life and work of the Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin, The Last Bolshevik is a tribute from one filmmaker to another. The film captures the commitment, energy, struggles, illusions and disillusions of a believing but never naïve Bolshevik.
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Critics reviews
Filled with sly jokes at the expense of the censors’ innate absurdities, this story can nonetheless only be a tragedy, and only the director’s haunting sci-fi photoplay, La jétée, exceeds it for emotional heft.
Jake Cole
June 26, 2015
The incredibly rich palette of textures, lights, and colors Marker discovers in video in Last Bolshevik sets new standards for the medium’s beauty and expressiveness. It’s a contentious essay on the history of Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself; beyond that it’s a multifaceted self-portrait and autocritique by Marker of what it has meant to be a committed leftist for most of this century. The subject is what it meant to be a communist — and what it means to think about communism today.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 21, 1994
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